The universe has never made things easy: every time you look away, it becomes bigger, stranger, curiouser. And that’s only the part we can see. As you might have heard if you pay attention to these things (and will be distressed to learn if you don’t), up to 80% of the matter in the universe is simply missing. The Milky Way spins so fast it would fly apart if the gravity of some invisible matter weren’t holding it together. Clusters of galaxies, buzzing around one another like angry bees, would similarly fragment and disperse. And when you run the gravitational numbers, the mysterious matter that keeps all that cosmic disintegration from happening should outweigh the familiar stuff by about 4 to 1.

It was in the 1930s that astronomer Fritz Zwicky first proclaimed — to general skepticism — that what is now known commonly as dark matter must exist, surrounding most galaxies like a glass paperweight surrounds a butterfly. But not only could physicists not detect the material, they couldn’t even agree on what they should be looking for. Dark matter thus became as much an article of cosmological faith as of well-established theory. Now it appears that faith may have been rewarded. Just as researchers working at Europe’s Large Hadron Collider last year announced that they had bagged the Higgs Boson, so did investigators this week reveal that they’ve found compelling evidence for a type of theorized particle known as a WIMP — for weakly interacting massive particle — and that at least one form of it may be the dark quarry they’ve been hunting for 80 years.

The new findings come from a team of physicists led by Samuel Ting, of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, relying on data gathered by the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), a detector delivered to the International Space Station in 2011. The purpose of the AMS is to sift incoming cosmic rays — streams of high energy pouring in from outside the solar system — for unusual particles. Dark-matter particles, if they exist, might also get mingled into this cosmic flow, but theories suggest they’d be hard to spot. They can pass through ordinary matter as if it weren’t there (billions could be streaming through your body as you read these words) and they’d be utterly invisible to any sort of telescope.

If we can’t detect dark matter itself, however, we might detect its byproducts. Theorists think that when two dark-matter particles meet out in space, they’ll occasionally, albeit not often, destroy each other in a tiny burst of energy. That energy would then condense back into entirely different particles: an ordinary electron and its much rarer antimatter counterpart, a positron, which would go speeding away from each other in some random direction.

It’s these positrons that AMS detected — some 400,000 of them in the nearly two years it’s been in operation. The number and energy of the positrons is consistent with what theorists would expect if dark matter really is smashing into itself throughout the Milky Way. So is the fact that the positrons are hitting the detector from all directions, which it should if dark matter truly pervades the Milky Way. Says Jeremiah Ostriker, a Princeton astrophysicist who has been in the forefront of dark-matter theory since the 1970s, “The AMS experiment may — just may — have detected [evidence of] dark-matter decay.”

Ostriker’s caution, and that of the AMS team at a press conference on Wednesday, is understandable, and not just because the evidence is indirect — like spotting bear tracks instead of the bear. Dark-matter collisions, the scientists acknowledge, are not the only possible source of positrons. They could be streaming off of spinning pulsars, the superdense remnants of exploding stars that also pervade the Milky Way. Their ubiquity would send positrons to us from all directions just the way dark matter would. And even if the pulsars aren’t responsible, says Ostriker, whose new book, Heart of Darkness, chronicles the history of dark-matter research since the very beginning, the positrons “could come from some other strange source” that astronomers haven’t thought of yet.

It’s a good thing, therefore, that the AMS will keep operating for several more years, at least: the more positrons it can find, the firmer the case could become that their source really is dark matter, and physicists might even be able to reason backward and infer the nature of the original particle itself. If AMS really does crack the mystery, Ting, who won a Nobel Prize in 1976 as a co-discoverer of a particle known as the J/psi meson, could well snag another. But he knows better than anyone that it’s a bit too early to start drafting the acceptance speech. The universe may give up its secrets eventually — but it never, ever does so easily.

The problem with a Dark Matter could be in the way how the luminosity of a group of stars calculated. The incoming energy will never retransmitted by a star, so the luminosity of a dense group of stars is much lower than the sum of they luminosities.

Dark matter and energy are mathematical construct necessary to make the Big Bang theory work. Rather than admit that the BBT is wrong they add fudge factors, huge ones, with absolutely no justification. If you then go look hard enough and throw enough money at it of course you will find what you are looking for! Did they not fudge the BBT theory for a CBR of 2.7K when it should have been 50K? The mathematicians are ruining science. Shame on them.

The print version of this article included a pie chart showing ordinary matter at 5%, Dark matter at 27% and Dark energy at 68%. Am I the only one wondering what happened to all of the ordinary energy in the universe? I guess it's cooler to think about dark matter and energy, whose existence hasn't been proven than to consider "ordinary" energy. Perhaps when we figure out how the universe we can detect creates such forces as gravity and other vaguely understood concepts, we can spend time chasing down the "Dark" side.

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A part of the problem of making
cutting-edge science intelligible to commons is the strange habit of scientists
to use suggestive, whimsical idioms to nomenclature deep, non-intuitive ideas that are really paradigm shifting.
Thus we were exposed to “Black Holes”, “God’s particle”, “Big Bang” and “Quantum
Jumps” to name just a few physics concepts. Dark matter is one more from the
latest crop of misleading (to non-pros) idioms. As biological machines, we are
used to “see” things that exist physically in the dimensions relevant to
Natural Selection. (Even this ability is not perfect, i.e. we can’t see microbes,
nor detect radioactivity with our natural senses). Therefore, commonsense has a
problem to accept the simple fact that, more than 50 years ago the existence of
a “dark matter-like” particle was experimentally proven, (the Neutrino, more
that 25 years after its existence was postulated by W.E. Pauli). There is
nothing “witchcrafty” about the “darkness” of certain elementary particles,
because there is nothing “Devine” in our limitation to sense only Electro-Magnetic
signals. Particles that do not participate in EM interactions are invisible to
our eyes, but not dark in the usual meaning. Conventional darkness relates to
the absorption of light (EM radiation) by EM-active material (black matter). Other
senses - audio, smell/taste, tactile, temperature - are also dependant on EM
interaction to register. So Dark Matter is not just transparent, it’s
unobservable. Other than this characteristic, dark matter is as Normal as any common
material entity. We just have to accept the idea that our eyes do not see
everything there is.

En este artículo se lee este párrafo: "If we can’t detect dark matter itself, however, we might detect its byproducts. Theorists think that when two dark matter particles meet out in space, they’ll occasionally, albeit not often, destroy each other in a tiny burst of energy. That energy would then condense back into entirely different particles: an ordinary electron and its much rarer antimatter counterpart, a positron, which would go speeding away from each other in some random direction."

Luego en el párrafo siguiente leemos esto: "It’s these positrons that AMS detected — some 400,000 of them in the nearly two years it’s been in operation. The number and energy of the positrons is consistent with what theorists would expect if dark matter really is smashing into itself throughout the Milky Way. So is the fact that the positrons are hitting the detector from all directions, which it should if dark matter truly pervades the Milky Way."

I can't help but wonder about people. In another recent news article, someone thought they saw a sign from God in a Goldfish cracker (It had obviously come into contact with a Phillips head screw on the edge of a machine and someone likely tossed it back into the batch, or it fell back in). In this article, scientists gush about how these findings help bolster Dark Matter - or not.

The universe is a very energetic place. It's been around a long, long time. Dark matter's qualities are based almost entirely on conjecture, and unfortunately that conjecture includes evidence of other things we already know a lot about that have nothing to do with dark matter. So while they found stuff they call evidence of dark matter, it's going to take a hell of a lot more to "prove" dark matter exists since this evidence has other well known explanations as well.

I usually read anything posted on the dark matter topic, because they
interest me, but what I see in this article seems to be a repackaged version of
earlier articles with a few slightly new conjectures.

This appears to be one of those "the answer is just over the next
hill" articles, with no imminent resolution, but which promises a
virtually limitless number of additional articles on the subject when it is a
slow science news week.

I cannot be the only one who noticed this . . . the cover image that links to this article, look closely. Either someone has messed with that image, or there is a clear depiction of a child's head from the shoulders up in this NASA photo.

For unprofessional people, like me, the only image which can be depicted is a vision that something dark and big ameba-like thing intently hold cosmic world together. And it is valuable that I can have a new image of shebang of universe like this.

Theory says DM should be a spherical halo enveloping the flattened spiral disk that is the Milky Way galaxy. Therefore putative DM collisions should come equally from all directions. But pulsars, the remnants of massive stars that went supernova, are ordinary baryonic matter and their parent stars should show an overwhelming statistical bias towards the plane of the Milky Way. Therefore their positron emissions would not be omnidirectional. If the detected positrons are extragalactic coming from galaxies all over the universe, this quandary is resolved. So, are the positrons "local" i.e. from our Milky Way or can/are they detected from throughout the universe?

I am glad to see that a science correspondent at Time can give an accurate description of this new development, largely free of hype. During the past 3 decades, string theorists' shameless and self-contradictory hypes have turned particle physics into a laughing stock. Fortunately, Mr. Lemonick took care not to quote any string theorists (e.g. Brian Greene) and thus spared us more nonsense.

The positron signal, as the article pointed out, does not have to come from Dark Matter. Nobody knows how many positron sources contribute to the background, much less what the background should look like. Without the ability to filter out the background, "discovering" Dark Matter through positron signal is little more than a pipe dream.

AMS itself was originally designed to test some of the more crazy ideas back in days when string theorists were promising the imminent discovery of various string-inspired phenomenology and some sane people still took them seriously. Over the next 18 years, it became harder and harder to justify the multi-billion-dollar price tag on ungrounded speculations of a cult that was gradually discredited by the science community. Dark Matter's discovery thus becomes the perfect excuse to continue to the project.

I wish prof. Ting good luck, because the particle physics community really needs a boost to recover from string-inflicted damage to the field. Otherwise, a field that was founded by giants like Dirac and Einstein may end up becoming another branch of astrology.